> "Good explanations." Thanks. > "What's more interesting is the Amiga model of CPU + accelerators is becoming the new default in high-performance application

> "Good explanations." Thanks. > "What's more interesting is the Amiga model of CPU + accelerators is becoming the new default in high-performance applications. There could be a revival of OS's natively supporting accelerators of a niche market that cares about that sort of thing." It's possible, though I'd like to see an OS designed from the ground up to support this type of heterogeneous architecture. A few years back I wrote a few notes about how to make better use of reconfigurable computing (on an Amiga forum, funnily enough), still think the basic ideas are sound, though there are plenty of details left to work out: http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=679874&postcount=98 http://www.amiga.org/forums/showpost.php?p=679874&postcount=... > "The Octeon II's often go for around $200 on eBay. They have 16 cores, multi-Gbps network acceleration, onboard crypto, Linux support, and use little power. That's the kind of shit that has potential. Maybe that plus a good FPGA for high-end model where main SOC is multiplexed like usual but one app at a time gets FPGA and/or GPU. A bunch of simple cores, the right on-board accelerators, and FPGA could combine in performance-critical apps to blow Xeons out the water despite being on older process nodes." The Octeon III sounds like quite a high end device, I'm sure it'd be a beast with regards to performance, but do you know of anything similar at a lower price point? Does $200 get you an Octeon II evaluation board on eBay?